PROFESSION

Study analyzes physical and mental scars of Civil War vets

Some ailments were not unlike those seen in soldiers in the years after the Vietnam War and in those coming home from Iraq.

By Damon Adams, AMNews staff. Feb. 27, 2006.

In the War Between the States, soldiers dealt with cannons firing at them, hand-to-hand combat in open fields and the deaths of family and friends who served in the same military unit. The mental and physical scars of battle ran deep long after the firing stopped, with the traumatic experiences of the Civil War translating into a lifetime of increased physical and mental diseases for soldiers, according to a new study.

The youngest men and those who witnessed the most deaths had higher rates of postwar problems.

In fact, it appears that Civil War veterans had similar health effects as have Americans in other wars.

"There can be serious mental and physical health costs of traumatic war exposure," said Roxane Cohen Silver, PhD, co-author of the study in the February issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. The mental impact "was quite consistent with what we've seen in more recent wars."

Dr. Silver and fellow researchers analyzed the military and medical records of 15,027 Union Army veterans from the Civil War. They looked at cardiac, gastrointestinal and mental illnesses during the soldiers' lifetimes. Confederate soldiers did not have a comparable database for study, but researchers suspect that those troops had similar problems.

Civil War soldiers were vulnerable due to close-up combat, bloody battles and other reasons, researchers said. For one thing, family members and friends were often assigned to the same company, and when there were casualties, survivors were left with few remaining friends.

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